Categories

Meta

Month: March 2014

I have so many questions about Minimum wage it makes my mind spin every time I discuss it with anyone. It’s a challenging question. Why is going up? Why does it need to go up? WHen is it going to go up again? It would be great if we could consider it an important scientific endeavor and important to our development as a species not just a country.

We need a way to trade the value of what we do, but how much do we pay for people to do things that are easy to do? Or don’t require the training of other professions? Let’s just consider the doctor and the bus boy, two jobs that require different training levels and education.

Who deserves to be payed more? The doctor gets a good job where he helps people everyday, and the opportunity for education his entire life. The bus boy has to work weird hours, pick up garbage, and clean dishes. In some sense he has the tougher job, the doctor would never do a bus boys work. You’d have to pay him more than the bus boy is willing to be payed. Of course that doctor had to go to school for many more years and spend time in residency. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t as difficult as it might seem. They were surrounded by friends and family most of the time, and were assisted by colleagues, teachers, and financial assistance/loans. It definitely takes a special person to be a doctor, it also takes a special amount of environmental conditions. Such as all the support groups.

I’m not saying that doctors or anyone who worked hard for their careers deserve to be payed less money, I’m saying that we need to consider how financial security reflects the supposed ‘value’ of someone’s life. Considering that we are all human beings and we are equals to our peers than we should consider the amount we pay someone in accordance with the way we value their existence and participation in the human race. Giving everyone financial security is a clear way of expressing equality among citizens. But how do you determine financial security? (Good topic for later discussion: What does financial security entail?)

In Washington, more specifically Seattle, $15 dollars an hour is being considered for the new minimum wage. That seems a bit high to me, but I really don’t know… If it doesn’t become $15 on this ballot its just a matter of time before it becomes $15 dollars on the next ballot, and that the minimum wage will continue to increase because of factors such as inflation and the creation of objects of value (Manufacturing, mining,etc). If this is the case why do we wait so long to adjust the number, it originally started at $1 an hour and now we’re considering $15… According to the trend it will shortly after be $20 than $40 than whatever inflation + value creation deems reasonable.

So why not increase the minimum wage on a linear path, so that we don’t let people suffer, but still provide business opportunities to intelligently invest an employees without worrying about going under?

There are so many variables and issues to be considered, I wish I could run clear experiments to determine the best result… I love arguing with my grandfather about it, but it would be awesome if we were on the same page according to evidence instead of speculative reasoning about the willingness of people to self motivate/educate and work to make our world better for everyone. Ahhhh it’s crazy, I would love to spend more time learning about wage control.

For a recent class assignment we were asked to research different SaaS, Paas, and cloud services. I was assigned Amazon Redshift, and we learned about how scalable and rather awesome their data warehousing services are. Not just from a user standpoint or a potential customer, but just the impact that scale of data storage has on technical networking and software advancements.

Mars is in Utah

Data Storage is so integral to how digital devices work, and for me it’s hard to conceive of a world before GBs of storage. For as long as I can remember there were CDs, and CDs stored a relatively large amount of data when they were introduced. Anyways. That number is increasing so quickly! Just a couple days ago a 128GB micro sd card was put on Amazon… 128GBs in the size of a fingernail… That’s incredible!

Its even crazier that I can log in through my browser to manage a database of petabytes of information!? How much longer before everyone in America has access to that kind of information and data crunching? Every human could essentially have access to a supercomputer. That’s amazing! If everyone had a supercomputer supporting them our world would be different. Getting answers would be intuitive and unobtrusive. You could simply talk, think, gesture, or reference something in the physical world and be provided answers immediately. Describing anything to anyone would be provided with not only your description put extended resources, videos, images, and references. The amount of information you could convey with one conversation would be amazing. It would be like adding another language on top of english. Communication would become more powerful. And we need these giant server farms and data-warehouses to make that possible.

Tahoe is so beautifully blue

Data Storage and Computer Networking are two of the reasons I love computers. The idea that a computer system could help solve problems at a common and global scale makes me excited. If in any way I made someone more capable of helping someone else, I’m happy with what I’m doing.

Its going from that principle or philosophy and applying it to finding an influential way to have a meaningful positive impact is what becomes difficult. I’m thankful that this is the thing I stress out about, I’m glad its not something like keeping Velociraptors from eating my children!

I really wish I knew if computers were, at the end of the human race, more of a positive impact for our species or not? Are there ways a digital age could put us in danger?

That’s one way to look at technology. But sometimes you must take risks to find rewards. Humans are not the only species to take risks. Even though the evolution of the human brain is fascinating, it can be seen as a lot of little things adding up to our success. Other species experience too, but probably in the same way. One of the evolutionary checkpoints for our species was the development of the scientific method. At one time, no one understood how the universe worked or how to store pictures of your meal in a building 200 miles away.

This was about three weeks ago, mid February

And this photo from a few days ago March 10 or 11. Spring is amazing
(Also, focusing with my Nexus 5 on these plants was impossible)

No one knew than and not many people know now. It all abstraction, we have an understanding, but even are astronomers or astrophysicists may never know. There is still another wall for our arrow to hit (As you might have guessed, I’ve been watching the new Cosmos). Once we find why the big bang theory happened, we’ll just want to understand how that happened. Either way it doesn’t really matter. All we have is right now, and getting the best out of what were capable of right now is using computers and the technical capabilities of modern data storage and knowledge sharing to improve the life’s of humans everywhere. Wooooo! Let’s do it!

I read in article recently about playing Ultimate, and if anyone finds it let me know, because I can’t find it anywhere… I think it was in somebodies blog…

The one line from the article I can’t stop thinking about goes something like this: “Just come out and watch a frisbee fly through the air.” It’s so true. If you can get a potential ultimate player to see how awesome a frisbee flying through the air is, chances are they’re going to come out again. I don’t know how true this is for everyone, and I’m learning how to encourage people to see this amazing feat of aerodynamics and human control.

The reason this idea reverberates so well with me is because I sincerely enjoy watching a frisbee travel through the air. It’s amazing, and so unique to this sport. There’s something about how it slows down everything around it, and allows you to watch and track so fluidly, its engrossing! I love frisbee.

5 Reasons to play Ultimate:

1. Watching a frisbee fly is amazing.
I feel like a hippy saying this but it’s too true. It’s beautiful.

2. If you find a good group of players, they will become like family.
Anytime I see someone I played frisbee with I get a warm fuzzy feeling in my chest. These friends became your teammates, and teammates hold a special place in your heart.

3. Anyone can play. Anyone, always.
This is my favorite reason, anyone can potentially play, as long as you have the right attitude. It’s simple to learn and requires little more than a disc!

4. It is a great workout.
You can run as much as you want on offense, but on defense you have to run!

5. It gives you a way to get in the zone.
Being in the zone is essential for happiness, playing a sport provides zoney experiences.